1 The big questions - God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? by John Lennox #filosofoasuainsaputa #pericolodeltuono #grecicontroebrei #diotappabuchi
Since his books deal with the origin of the universe, it was inevitable that he should consider the matter of the existence of a Divine Creator. However, A Brief History of Time left this matter tantalizingly open, by ending with the much-quoted statement that if physicists were to find a “Theory of Everything” (that is, a theory that unified the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity), we would “know the Mind of God”.Read more at location 114
The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws: “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing”.Read more at location 122
“Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”Read more at location 125
“How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a Creator?”Read more at location 134
Hawking dismisses philosophy. Referring to his list of questions, he writes: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.Read more at location 140
As a result scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”Read more at location 142
The very first thing I notice is that Hawking’s statement about philosophy is itself a philosophical statement. It is manifestly not a statement of science: it is a metaphysical statement about science. Therefore, his statement that philosophy is dead contradicts itself. It is a classic example of logical incoherence.Read more at location 147
Hawking’s attitude to philosophy contrasts markedly with that of Albert EinsteinRead more at location 149
I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science.Read more at location 151
scientism – the view that science is the only way to truth. It is a conviction characteristic of that movement in secular thought known as the “New Atheism”,Read more at location 157
Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar pointed out this dangerRead more at location 162
Medawar goes on to say: “The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as: ‘How did everything begin?’ ‘What are we all here for?’ ‘What is the point of living?’”Read more at location 168
Francis Collins is equally clear on the limitations of science: “Science is powerless to answer questions such as ‘Why did the universe come into being?’ ‘What is the meaning of human existence?’ ‘What happens after we die?’”Read more at location 172
For instance, there is widespread acknowledgment that it is very difficult to get a base for morality in science.Read more at location 177
Einstein proceeded to point out that science cannot form a base for morality: “every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formulae must fail”.Read more at location 181
Richard Feynman, also a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, shared Einstein’s view: “Even the greatest forces and abilities don’t seem to carry any clear instructions on how to use them.Read more at location 183
Elsewhere he states that “ethical values lie outside the scientific realm”.Read more at location 187
insofar as he is interpreting and applying science to ultimate questions like the existence of God, Hawking is doing metaphysics.Read more at location 190
“Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life.”Read more at location 212
but Hawking now claims that physics has no longer any room for God,Read more at location 220
it thunders, if we suppose that it is a god roaring – as some of the ancients did – we would scarcely be in a mood to investigateRead more at location 224
So we certainly need to remove deification of the forces of nature in order to be free to study nature. This was a revolutionary step in thinking, taken, as Hawking points out, by early Greek natural philosophers like Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes of Milesia over 2,500 years ago.Read more at location 226
He added derisively: “If cows and horses or lions had hands and could draw, then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, cows like cows, making their bodies similarRead more at location 239
the Hebrew leader Moses had warned against worshipping “other gods, bowing down to them or to the sun or the moon or the stars of the sky”. Later, the prophet Jeremiah, writing in about 600 BC, similarly denounced the absurdity of deifying nature and worshipping the sun, moon and stars.Read more at location 250
It is to imagine that getting rid of gods either necessitates, or is the same as, getting rid of God.Read more at location 253
What had saved them from that superstition was their belief in the One True God, Creator of heaven and earth.Read more at location 257
That is, the idolatrous and polytheistic universe described by Homer and Hesiod was not the original world-picture of humankind.Read more at location 259
polytheism arguably constitutes a perversion of an original belief in the One Creator God. It was this perversion that needed to be corrected, by recovering belief in the Creator and not by jettisoning it.Read more at location 263
Werner Jaeger writes: If we compare this Greek hypostasis of the world-creative Eros with that of the Logos in the Hebrew account of creation, we may observe a deep-lying difference in the outlook of the two peoples.Read more at location 266
he confuses God with the gods. And that inevitably leads him to a completely inadequate view of God, as a God of the GapsRead more at location 279
a view of God that is not to be found in any major monotheistic religion, where God is not a God of the Gaps but the author of the whole show.
